5 ms·

Its funny to me how all these people who learned js/react (bootcampers/"fullstackers"?) before html are now discovering html. as a web dinosaur like me (15 year

Its funny to me how all these people who learned js/react (bootcampers/"fullstackers"?) before html are now discovering html. as a web dinosaur like me (15 years) i've watched this whole cycle play out. not that js/react are not useful, but rarely should be your starting point. much better to use them progressively when the trade off are worthwhile.

atoav 4y ago
I am one of those people who started reading a book on HTML when I was 10. I didn't understand a lot, but kept reading again and again and with 13 I understood enough context to create HTML websites. For most projects I have been doing since it was either pure HTML, CSS wirh a few sprinkles of handwritten Vanilla JS, or Jinja2 templates with occasional PHP. When it got really complicated I used Flask or Django. But to this day I never understood people who use js/react for pages that could have been handwritten with zero js in half a day (including a handwritten fluid CSS layout).
- capableweb 4y ago
  > But to this day I never understood people who use js/react for pages that could have been handwritten with zero js in half a day (including a handwritten fluid CSS layout). I think people tend to improve their knowledge of some specific tool/language (JS in this case) and wanting it to apply to everything, not just what they initially learned it for and even if it might not be a great fit. If all you know (because its what the schools/bootcamps teach) is generating HTML via DOM operations in JS, you might not even know better/simpler ways of doing it. A bit like if someone just knew C and haven't really explored other languages/environments, then they might think that building a server serving HTML is a great thing to build in C, rather than using pre-built tools that serve static files or even using a safer language.
- ttty 4y ago
  I'm building a simple page. Ok let's do simple html. Now I need popup for email capture, ok add a bit of hacky js. Now add a menu, could potentially be done with css only. Now add responsive images. Good luck. You need to process then on server side, then handle them on client side etc... Now add some customer area... Add a few more features and it becomes complex. Why would you want to now throw away all this and rewrite in react when you could just start with react. In addition I can even migrate my old app to the new one and sometimes I can just copy paste certain components and css styles (thanks to css in Js) and it just works. Honestly I don’t want to write responsive images manually. I just wrote a system once, now any app reuses the same thing. Same for other stuff. Plus I only need to know react and I can build anything. You telling me now to learn htmlx syntax and use it sometimes, then use react other times just because… it’s simpler. The benefit is minimal, but now I need to know 2 worlds: react and htmlx.
  - atoav 4y ago
    Not meant as a criticism, but if this is the way you build websites, you are doing it wrong. If you are building a website in a way where you can not anticipate beforehand what will be needed a few steps later because you skip the one most essential step — the planning phase — you are gonna have a bad time. Of course customers change their mind constantly, which is why you anticipate this in you choice of architecture to leave some wiggle room. The scenario you described tho: I never even remotely had a situation where it bit me in the arse that I wrote HTML with JS sprinkled in. For more complex stuff I have flask, django, websockets, htmx, custom REST-APIs I can built in any other language interacting with custom JS on that webpage (most of the software I write is server side). Or I could just take something like Grav CMS and write a custom Theme and some plugins for it. What is a good starting point depends on the kind of website. There is so many ways to skin the cat it is not even funny. And if you don't know what cat it is beforehand it is your fault for not asking.
- chiefalchemist 4y ago
  I still don't get the love affair with CSS in JS. It defeats much of the purpose of CSS. Also, my idea of a FE component is that of a class. A black box if you will. It the markup structure with the details as properties. Reusable because all properties are set from outide. If you're hardcoding CSS within the "component" then it's not a component. And then having to effectively rebuild the entire app because a hardcoded bit of (Tailwind) CSS needed to he changed?? That's a step forward? From a professional / career stand point I'm interested in React. But its model of thinking feels like 1999 in some ways. I'm missing something? What am I missing?
  - solardev 4y ago
    As a react dev, I don't like CSS in JS either. It brings back the old font tag approach of individually styling components. As an alternative, you can just assign class names to components and use global CSS like the old days, if you prefer. Sass is pretty great, basically CSS with better selectors and variables.
    - chiefalchemist 4y ago
      Exactly. Something like Tailwind should be done in the Sass, not by assigning a gazillion helpers. Have a component-type class in the component then use Sass to configure that with helper properties (read: functions and mixins, etc.) But hardcoding? Inline? I did that in 1997. Keyword in. I know TW is done with Sass
  - darepublic 4y ago
    The CSS in js components can be fully reusable between compatible frameworks, without any wiring of separate CSS files, and can also utilize theme configuration. Also just like how jsx is a form of html in js, having your style definitions in the same place makes it a lot easier to immediately grok what the component does and how it will look
    - chiefalchemist 4y ago
      Not if that CSS is styling (unique to the project). Once it's "hardwired" you have to rewire it to use it again, or worse...if the styling changes you have to rebuild. In the context of CSS's intention, that's an anti-pattern. Yes, people do it. But that doesn't change the anti-ness. If you're editing the actual components then that's a step backwards in time. They should be like (OOP) classes. Completely agnostic. Completely "decoupled". They should be the structure (i.e. markup). But the styling should be abstracted out into "real" CSS, not inlined hardcoded CSS. Put another way, for all intents and purposes CSS in JS is like using important!. Nuff said.
- myth_drannon 4y ago
  You are not going to be promoted if you quickly build something using simple tools. Complex and overengineered systems is where the golden opportunity is.
- solardev 4y ago
  HTML is hard to compose (as in composing a page out of modular components), reuse (your toolbar everywhere has to recreate a bunch of components, like the nav section, logged in state, etc.). Sure you can do that with server-side templates, but it's more readable (especially in a team) to use React components. For me the main benefits of React didn't really shine until I had to maintain complex state and component trees among multiple devs. What is overkill for a simple blog is an absolute godsend for more complex apps. Although frankly I still think Angular had a much better architecture, and I'm kinda sad React took over. But hey the frontend landscape gets a revolution every year or two (sigh) so who knows what the dominant paradigm will be by 2024.
rambambram 4y ago
I just want to thank you and also chime in. I'm not even 40 years old and all this frontend crap from the last decade or so makes me feel old. I started learning this webdev stuff from an HTML book in the nineties. A time when 'frontend' meant HTML and CSS, and maybe some plain JS. I'm not here to piss on JS frameworks, it's good that devs push the limits of what's possible, I guess. But there's something to say for simplicity and stuff that's so matured that you can really rely on it. Making sound decisions for your product, your stack and your architecture is a skill.
- beardedetim 4y ago
  > making sound decisions ... Is a skill I agree! It sucks that most jobs don't care about paying for that skill though.
- solardev 4y ago
  As someone who's a similar age, I wonder if that's a bit of rose colored nolstagia? Sure, these days the JS ecosystem is incredibly fragmented. Back then it was CSS that was so rapidly evolving nobody could keep up. Remember the ACID tests? And that was even before flexboxes made things both simpler and more complicated. Then there was the streaming wars, where RealPlayer and Flash and ActiveX and whoever else competed to be able to deliver <video>. And what we solve now with CSS layouts and React components used to require frames and iframes and sprinkled JS drop downs that spoke to ColdFusion templates served from a single old Apache instance shared between a thousand users and constantly crashed, and https cost like a thousand dollars and couldn't be used internationally... The web was never simple. We were just younger then and our neurons weren't so degraded yet. /sigh
- Shorel 4y ago
  These new technologies allow me to build websites about as fast now as I could build applications 25 years ago with FoxPro. The HTML and CSS from the nineties require about five times more work just to get the same results. This is progress.
seydor 4y ago
I don't think it's funny, it's sad, and i think it s fueled by overvalued tech sector that no longer seeks to innovate but is stuck rearranging the chairs. I can offer the major redesigns of pretty much any online service lately as an example of making an app at times worse than it was before, just for the sake of change. As a (bad) side-effect, people have stopped creating amateur websites, because it's hard. HTML was easy and fun, and everyone wanted to create their own geocities monstrosity. I'm looking at modern web constructs like WebXR with disbelief: How is it an hypertext standard if it doesnt even involve html tags (it's just a rehash of openGL , but in JS??). Why dont we make it easy for people to make quirky stuff anymore?
- bigDinosaur 4y ago
  You can create an amateur website in exactly the same way as 20 years ago. Is it that hard? It's hard perhaps to step back and just play with web tech if you're indoctrinated into the modern development hellscape, but I don't see any reason you can't be ftping html files into a www directory to your heart's content if you really want to.
  - JohnCurran 4y ago
    I think one of the biggest issues now is for peopling learning is if you just search “get started with web development”, the very first result says “Pick up a Frontend Framework.” Newbies are immediately plunged into the world of npm, react/vue, and AWS. Gone are the days where the tutorials are “write a page in HTML and FTP it on to a server”
  - seydor 4y ago
    you can't because everything you might want to embed/add now asks you to either use npm or something of the sort. I can't even find ways to 'just' download JS in libraries lately. In my example, suppose you wanted to add a 3d panorama with a-frame (easiest way), here is the installation:https://aframe.io/docs/1.3.0/introduction/installation.html https://aframe.io/docs/1.3.0/introduction/installation.html
    - 4y ago
Tade0 4y ago
The author is a backend developer whose tech stack (as described in his profile) is: C# Python C++ Django Git Jenkins Docker Kubernetes Also sort of a web dinosaur here (remember when VRML was supposed to change the web forever?). Even today 90% of the web is static pages with JS sprinkled on top because much of the process of creating that was automated years ago. Contrary to popular belief people aren't actually that generous in their usage of SPAs because it's expensive. Also while React has the highest market share, it's not the only framework out there.
- solardev 4y ago
  What's really saddened me isn't so much the inevitable change in tech stacks, but the incredible centralization of websites. There isn't really meaningfully a "web" anymore. For most people the internet is just FAANG and that's it. Indie sites and good personal projects are totally gone, replaced by click bait and Medium SEO spam. It's just a corporate hellhole now, with Facebook owning the frontend via React, Google and Apple owning the hardware, and Amazon owning the network. I miss those one person passion project pages that you used to be able to find on Yahoo.
  - marc_io 4y ago
    I think the “web” is still very strong, but it is now extremely commercial. If a person wants to create a website these days is mainly for business purposes. Pretty much all other uses had migrated to the FAANG (or MAANG, rather).
  - bityard 4y ago
    It feels weird to read this on HN, where a sizeable fraction of the links on the front page often go to websites built by internet randos. If you're talking about web sites as art projects, there are communities like that although they are fairly small. Neocities is one of the more prominent ones. The small web still exists, but you have to stray quite a way off the beaten path to find it.
    - solardev 4y ago
ksec 4y ago
>as a web dinosaur like me (15 years) 2022 - 15 = 2007.... Which means you aren't even in the IE era. Hardly a dinosaur if you ask me :)

atoav 4y ago

I am one of those people who started reading a book on HTML when I was 10. I didn't understand a lot, but kept reading again and again and with 13 I understood enough context to create HTML websites. For most projects I have been doing since it was either pure HTML, CSS wirh a few sprinkles of handwritten Vanilla JS, or Jinja2 templates with occasional PHP. When it got really complicated I used Flask or Django. But to this day I never understood people who use js/react for pages that could have been handwritten with zero js in half a day (including a handwritten fluid CSS layout).

capableweb 4y ago
> But to this day I never understood people who use js/react for pages that could have been handwritten with zero js in half a day (including a handwritten fluid CSS layout). I think people tend to improve their knowledge of some specific tool/language (JS in this case) and wanting it to apply to everything, not just what they initially learned it for and even if it might not be a great fit. If all you know (because its what the schools/bootcamps teach) is generating HTML via DOM operations in JS, you might not even know better/simpler ways of doing it. A bit like if someone just knew C and haven't really explored other languages/environments, then they might think that building a server serving HTML is a great thing to build in C, rather than using pre-built tools that serve static files or even using a safer language.
ttty 4y ago
I'm building a simple page. Ok let's do simple html. Now I need popup for email capture, ok add a bit of hacky js. Now add a menu, could potentially be done with css only. Now add responsive images. Good luck. You need to process then on server side, then handle them on client side etc... Now add some customer area... Add a few more features and it becomes complex. Why would you want to now throw away all this and rewrite in react when you could just start with react. In addition I can even migrate my old app to the new one and sometimes I can just copy paste certain components and css styles (thanks to css in Js) and it just works. Honestly I don’t want to write responsive images manually. I just wrote a system once, now any app reuses the same thing. Same for other stuff. Plus I only need to know react and I can build anything. You telling me now to learn htmlx syntax and use it sometimes, then use react other times just because… it’s simpler. The benefit is minimal, but now I need to know 2 worlds: react and htmlx.
- atoav 4y ago
  Not meant as a criticism, but if this is the way you build websites, you are doing it wrong. If you are building a website in a way where you can not anticipate beforehand what will be needed a few steps later because you skip the one most essential step — the planning phase — you are gonna have a bad time. Of course customers change their mind constantly, which is why you anticipate this in you choice of architecture to leave some wiggle room. The scenario you described tho: I never even remotely had a situation where it bit me in the arse that I wrote HTML with JS sprinkled in. For more complex stuff I have flask, django, websockets, htmx, custom REST-APIs I can built in any other language interacting with custom JS on that webpage (most of the software I write is server side). Or I could just take something like Grav CMS and write a custom Theme and some plugins for it. What is a good starting point depends on the kind of website. There is so many ways to skin the cat it is not even funny. And if you don't know what cat it is beforehand it is your fault for not asking.
chiefalchemist 4y ago
I still don't get the love affair with CSS in JS. It defeats much of the purpose of CSS. Also, my idea of a FE component is that of a class. A black box if you will. It the markup structure with the details as properties. Reusable because all properties are set from outide. If you're hardcoding CSS within the "component" then it's not a component. And then having to effectively rebuild the entire app because a hardcoded bit of (Tailwind) CSS needed to he changed?? That's a step forward? From a professional / career stand point I'm interested in React. But its model of thinking feels like 1999 in some ways. I'm missing something? What am I missing?
- solardev 4y ago
  As a react dev, I don't like CSS in JS either. It brings back the old font tag approach of individually styling components. As an alternative, you can just assign class names to components and use global CSS like the old days, if you prefer. Sass is pretty great, basically CSS with better selectors and variables.
  - chiefalchemist 4y ago
    Exactly. Something like Tailwind should be done in the Sass, not by assigning a gazillion helpers. Have a component-type class in the component then use Sass to configure that with helper properties (read: functions and mixins, etc.) But hardcoding? Inline? I did that in 1997. Keyword in. I know TW is done with Sass
- darepublic 4y ago
  The CSS in js components can be fully reusable between compatible frameworks, without any wiring of separate CSS files, and can also utilize theme configuration. Also just like how jsx is a form of html in js, having your style definitions in the same place makes it a lot easier to immediately grok what the component does and how it will look
  - chiefalchemist 4y ago
    Not if that CSS is styling (unique to the project). Once it's "hardwired" you have to rewire it to use it again, or worse...if the styling changes you have to rebuild. In the context of CSS's intention, that's an anti-pattern. Yes, people do it. But that doesn't change the anti-ness. If you're editing the actual components then that's a step backwards in time. They should be like (OOP) classes. Completely agnostic. Completely "decoupled". They should be the structure (i.e. markup). But the styling should be abstracted out into "real" CSS, not inlined hardcoded CSS. Put another way, for all intents and purposes CSS in JS is like using important!. Nuff said.
myth_drannon 4y ago
You are not going to be promoted if you quickly build something using simple tools. Complex and overengineered systems is where the golden opportunity is.
solardev 4y ago
HTML is hard to compose (as in composing a page out of modular components), reuse (your toolbar everywhere has to recreate a bunch of components, like the nav section, logged in state, etc.). Sure you can do that with server-side templates, but it's more readable (especially in a team) to use React components. For me the main benefits of React didn't really shine until I had to maintain complex state and component trees among multiple devs. What is overkill for a simple blog is an absolute godsend for more complex apps. Although frankly I still think Angular had a much better architecture, and I'm kinda sad React took over. But hey the frontend landscape gets a revolution every year or two (sigh) so who knows what the dominant paradigm will be by 2024.

rambambram 4y ago

I just want to thank you and also chime in. I'm not even 40 years old and all this frontend crap from the last decade or so makes me feel old. I started learning this webdev stuff from an HTML book in the nineties. A time when 'frontend' meant HTML and CSS, and maybe some plain JS. I'm not here to piss on JS frameworks, it's good that devs push the limits of what's possible, I guess. But there's something to say for simplicity and stuff that's so matured that you can really rely on it. Making sound decisions for your product, your stack and your architecture is a skill.

beardedetim 4y ago
> making sound decisions ... Is a skill I agree! It sucks that most jobs don't care about paying for that skill though.
solardev 4y ago
As someone who's a similar age, I wonder if that's a bit of rose colored nolstagia? Sure, these days the JS ecosystem is incredibly fragmented. Back then it was CSS that was so rapidly evolving nobody could keep up. Remember the ACID tests? And that was even before flexboxes made things both simpler and more complicated. Then there was the streaming wars, where RealPlayer and Flash and ActiveX and whoever else competed to be able to deliver <video>. And what we solve now with CSS layouts and React components used to require frames and iframes and sprinkled JS drop downs that spoke to ColdFusion templates served from a single old Apache instance shared between a thousand users and constantly crashed, and https cost like a thousand dollars and couldn't be used internationally... The web was never simple. We were just younger then and our neurons weren't so degraded yet. /sigh
Shorel 4y ago
These new technologies allow me to build websites about as fast now as I could build applications 25 years ago with FoxPro. The HTML and CSS from the nineties require about five times more work just to get the same results. This is progress.

seydor 4y ago

I don't think it's funny, it's sad, and i think it s fueled by overvalued tech sector that no longer seeks to innovate but is stuck rearranging the chairs. I can offer the major redesigns of pretty much any online service lately as an example of making an app at times worse than it was before, just for the sake of change. As a (bad) side-effect, people have stopped creating amateur websites, because it's hard. HTML was easy and fun, and everyone wanted to create their own geocities monstrosity. I'm looking at modern web constructs like WebXR with disbelief: How is it an hypertext standard if it doesnt even involve html tags (it's just a rehash of openGL , but in JS??). Why dont we make it easy for people to make quirky stuff anymore?

bigDinosaur 4y ago
You can create an amateur website in exactly the same way as 20 years ago. Is it that hard? It's hard perhaps to step back and just play with web tech if you're indoctrinated into the modern development hellscape, but I don't see any reason you can't be ftping html files into a www directory to your heart's content if you really want to.
- JohnCurran 4y ago
  I think one of the biggest issues now is for peopling learning is if you just search “get started with web development”, the very first result says “Pick up a Frontend Framework.” Newbies are immediately plunged into the world of npm, react/vue, and AWS. Gone are the days where the tutorials are “write a page in HTML and FTP it on to a server”
- seydor 4y ago
  you can't because everything you might want to embed/add now asks you to either use npm or something of the sort. I can't even find ways to 'just' download JS in libraries lately. In my example, suppose you wanted to add a 3d panorama with a-frame (easiest way), here is the installation:https://aframe.io/docs/1.3.0/introduction/installation.html https://aframe.io/docs/1.3.0/introduction/installation.html
  - 4y ago

Tade0 4y ago

The author is a backend developer whose tech stack (as described in his profile) is: C# Python C++ Django Git Jenkins Docker Kubernetes Also sort of a web dinosaur here (remember when VRML was supposed to change the web forever?). Even today 90% of the web is static pages with JS sprinkled on top because much of the process of creating that was automated years ago. Contrary to popular belief people aren't actually that generous in their usage of SPAs because it's expensive. Also while React has the highest market share, it's not the only framework out there.

solardev 4y ago
What's really saddened me isn't so much the inevitable change in tech stacks, but the incredible centralization of websites. There isn't really meaningfully a "web" anymore. For most people the internet is just FAANG and that's it. Indie sites and good personal projects are totally gone, replaced by click bait and Medium SEO spam. It's just a corporate hellhole now, with Facebook owning the frontend via React, Google and Apple owning the hardware, and Amazon owning the network. I miss those one person passion project pages that you used to be able to find on Yahoo.
- marc_io 4y ago
  I think the “web” is still very strong, but it is now extremely commercial. If a person wants to create a website these days is mainly for business purposes. Pretty much all other uses had migrated to the FAANG (or MAANG, rather).
- bityard 4y ago
  It feels weird to read this on HN, where a sizeable fraction of the links on the front page often go to websites built by internet randos. If you're talking about web sites as art projects, there are communities like that although they are fairly small. Neocities is one of the more prominent ones. The small web still exists, but you have to stray quite a way off the beaten path to find it.
  - solardev 4y ago

ksec 4y ago

>as a web dinosaur like me (15 years) 2022 - 15 = 2007.... Which means you aren't even in the IE era. Hardly a dinosaur if you ask me :)